Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Moonraker »

I am reading through the Susan and Bill series at the moment. This is a 'first-read' for me, as I didn't see them as a child. Rather suited to the Secret Seven age-group, they are quite short books - under 100 pages, but most enjoyable.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Rob Houghton »

Maybe I'd prefer those, lol...sounds about the right age group for me! :P
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
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Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Daisy »

Moonraker wrote:I am reading through the Susan and Bill series at the moment. This is a 'first-read' for me, as I didn't see them as a child. Rather suited to the Secret Seven age-group, they are quite short books - under 100 pages, but most enjoyable.
I also only came across them as an adult and agree with you - very much for the younger reader.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

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I am reading Aksherley! 62 at the moment. How I wish there was a Malcolm Saville forum on which to comment! There are often nods to Blyton, noting similarities in its Journal, and I thought I'd share this with those of you who might not be members. Although referring mainly to Saville's books, he compares reaction to Blyton's books:
Tony Gillam, in [i]Acksherley! 61[/i], the journal of the Malcolm Saville Society, wrote:It is a truism that those books most loved by young readers are not always the ones adults would recommend. Enid Blyton is a case in point. Few adults would consider her writing to be 'quality literature' yet successive generations of children have devoured these bestsellers, (said to have sold more than 600 million copies since they first appeared in the 1930s). Despite her fairly consistent popularity with young readers, Blyton's output met with disapproval from parents, teachers, librarians and critics, for its perceived lack of literary merit and, later, as society grew more liberal, for its alleged elitism, sexism, racism and xenophobia.

Malcolm Saville's work is often compared with Blyton's. There are some obvious similarities (a group of children - plus a dog - having a series of outdoorsy adventures, largely unhindered by adults). However, Saville fans would argue that he is a more skillful writer, setting his adventures in real, identifiable locations which he invokes with some finely crafted prose. His characters are arguably more three-dimensional than Blyton's, and characters develop over the course of the series. Saville, though, also suffered at the hands of the critical establishment, with accusations that his books were increasingly 'out-of-touch' with the modern society in which his readers were growing up, and that the stories were formulaic and represented a reactionary world view.

Marcus Crouch's 1962 book Treasure Seekers and Borrowers covers children's litertaure in Britain in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. Crouch writes about how shortages of paper and time reduced the output of most writers during the Second World War. A notable exception is Blyton who, between 1942 and 1945, published 67 books. According to Crouch, in the same period, Saville published seven titles - (although I make it six) - while Arthur Ransome published only one new book...

© Tony Gillam
Apologies for the long quote, but I thought it worthy of inclusion in our forum.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by timv »

I'm a great Saville fan and read most of his main adventure series in my early teens, eg the 'Lone Pine', 'Jillies' and 'Nettleford' series and some of the 'Buckingham' books. But due to the varied availability of the books in the Armada series, I never read any series in chronological order and missed a lot of the later 'Lone Pine' books out - I read some of these in the later, Goodchild editions in the 1980s but even then MS was reckoned 'old fashioned' by critics and not all of them were republished.

It was useful that my family lived near Saville when he was in mid-Sussex (near Lewes) in the late 1960s-70s. We spent a lot of weekends in Rye, where he set part of the 'Lone Pine' series and lived nearby (Winchelsea) in the 1970s, and spent holidays in his Shropshire, so i could visit some of the sites and picture the relevant episodes there. I was aiming to put Saville's sites in my first 'Literary Landscapes' book along with Enid, contrasting the two, but now it is more likely the book will be on Blyton and Ransome so my Saville text and photos will have to wait for a later book.

incidentally, are there any fans of (a) Monica Edwards' Rye and SW Surrey farm/ seaside/ pony books or (b) Antonia Forest's Dorset family/ school books out there? Both authors were popular in the 1960s-70s, and ME has similarities to the 'Mistletoe Farm' books (remote post-War farm with no electricity and struggling with money) and AF to Enid's 'family crisis' books - and AF is a lot more 'adult' and cynical than Enid. But they seem to have dropped out of sight like Saville; I think the current generation are missing out on a lot of good writing..
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Daisy »

timv wrote: incidentally, are there any fans of (a) Monica Edwards' Rye and SW Surrey farm/ seaside/ pony books or (b) Antonia Forest's Dorset family/ school books out there? Both authors were popular in the 1960s-70s, and ME has similarities to the 'Mistletoe Farm' books (remote post-War farm with no electricity and struggling with money) and AF to Enid's 'family crisis' books - and AF is a lot more 'adult' and cynical than Enid. But they seem to have dropped out of sight like Saville; I think the current generation are missing out on a lot of good writing..
I have all the Monica Edwards books and only read 2 of them as a child. These I got through being a member of the Children's Book Club. I enjoy re-reading the whole series from time to time. I have also had the joy of spending 2 nights in the Vicarage at Rye Harbour where Monica lived as a child. It is now a B&B place and really lovely.

I agree that present day children are missing a lot of good reading.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Moonraker wrote:I am reading Aksherley! 62 at the moment... There are often nods to Blyton, noting similarities in its Journal, and I thought I'd share this with those of you who might not be members. Although referring mainly to Saville's books, he compares reaction to Blyton's books:
Tony Gillam, in [i]Acksherley! 61[/i], the journal of the Malcolm Saville Society, wrote:It is a truism that those books most loved by young readers are not always the ones adults would recommend. Enid Blyton is a case in point. Few adults would consider her writing to be 'quality literature' yet successive generations of children have devoured these bestsellers, (said to have sold more than 600 million copies since they first appeared in the 1930s). Despite her fairly consistent popularity with young readers, Blyton's output met with disapproval from parents, teachers, librarians and critics, for its perceived lack of literary merit and, later, as society grew more liberal, for its alleged elitism, sexism, racism and xenophobia.

Malcolm Saville's work is often compared with Blyton's. There are some obvious similarities (a group of children - plus a dog - having a series of outdoorsy adventures, largely unhindered by adults). However, Saville fans would argue that he is a more skillful writer, setting his adventures in real, identifiable locations which he invokes with some finely crafted prose. His characters are arguably more three-dimensional than Blyton's, and characters develop over the course of the series. Saville, though, also suffered at the hands of the critical establishment, with accusations that his books were increasingly 'out-of-touch' with the modern society in which his readers were growing up, and that the stories were formulaic and represented a reactionary world view.
Interesting observations. I've just finished the first two "Susan and Bill" titles and found myself making comparisons with Enid Blyton. They're shortish stories, about the length of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven books, and they have a similar feel to them as we get to know groups of children who explore the countryside - though the youngsters live on a new housing estate which strikes a more modern note. There's no mystery-solving in the two books I've read (Susan, Bill and the Wolf-Dog and Susan, Bill and the Ivy-Clad Oak) though each story features a character who is an outsider and something of a puzzle, so that provides a degree of intrigue. Otherwise, the action revolves mainly around childhood activities, friendships, rivalries and hostilities. At times, I was reminded of the Secret Seven versus Susie and co. Malcolm Saville creates a real sense of community and his adult characters are just as well-drawn as his younger characters. Those qualities are to be found in his Lone Pine series too, where he uses real settings and even takes us into the psychology of the villains on occasions. Enid Blyton sometimes gives us strongly-drawn adult characters where the focus is on family life, e.g. in the Six Cousins books and in novels like House-at-the-Corner and The Six Bad Boys, but adults in her books are generally quite sketchy and parents tend to be removed early on so the children are free to investigate mysterious happenings (Bill Smugs is an exception but then he is an adventurer like the children - and of course family life is an important theme in the Adventure series).

Malcolm Saville's stories may have more descriptive passages, a greater focus on adult characters and a deeper exploration of location and history - but Enid Blyton's stories have their strengths too. She's a master of lively, natural-sounding dialogue which simply bounces off the page. By comparison, Saville's dialogue can sound a little contrived at times. In fact, there's a slightly more formal feel about his writing altogether whereas Enid Blyton's feels delightfully fluid and spontaneous. Both are adept at creating atmosphere but I think Enid Blyton is better at building suspense and keeping the reader guessing. When I read the Lone Pine, Jillies and Buckinghams series I sometimes thought that Malcolm Saville revealed exactly what was going on too early in the narrative. It was still interesting seeing how everything was resolved in the end but I felt that Enid Blyton would have managed to keep the reader in the dark for longer.

Of the two "Susan and Bill" books I've read, I enjoyed Susan, Bill and the Wolf-Dog more because the reader comes to know a whole new community through the eyes of Susan, who moves house in the first chapter, and there's a feeling of menace as events unfold. Susan, Bill and the Ivy-Clad Oak didn't hold my attention to the same extent. It lacks pace and not much happens until the last couple of chapters - though I found those very interesting when I finally got to them! Susan, Bill and the Wolf-Dog has quite a few parallels with Enid Blyton's The Children at Green Meadows (though the latter is a much more complex story written for older readers) - a new housing estate encroaching on older dwellings, a granny, a large house inhabited by a well-to-do man, a "fierce" dog, a community coming to terms with social change...

Both books are attractively illustrated. My copy of Susan, Bill and the Wolf-Dog is a Knight paperback with illustrations by Lilian Buchanan, while Susan, Bill and the Ivy-Clad Oak is a Nelson hardback illustrated by Ernest Shepard.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Rob Houghton »

As someone who has tried and tried to read Malolm Saville, I have to disagree with the extract by Tony Gillam. I don't think Blyton's characters are necessarily any less dimensional than Savilles. I think it depends on how much your own imagination lends to a story and its characters. When I have read Saville's books, I find it really difficult to picture the characters, and also the settings (even though many of them are real life ones and some of them I have actually visited). Enid's characters leap off the page and I can see them moving and talking and interacting. Her locations are extremely easy to imagine also. I can see George's island, or the seaside town of Rubadub, or the Secret Seven's shed much more easily than anything Saville describes. I think this is because ENid left a lot to our own imagination, whereas when reading Saville you have to try and recreate real-life places - and the characters he writes about might not be the characters we picture. Sometimes, less is definitely more! 8)
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

I find that I can see Malcolm Saville's landscapes very clearly in my mind's eye. However, I don't bother about whether I'm picturing the places as they are in reality - I don't think that's important. When I first read his books I'd never visited any of the locations he mentions (except London, which features in some stories). I have since been to Lewes (Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds/The Secret of Galleybird Pit) and Rye (The Gay Dolphin Adventure and Rye Royal). Although it was interesting to see them, I won't feel obliged to remember the layout of the actual towns on future readings of the books. I'm not sure that even Malcolm Saville stuck slavishly to what was there in real life. Besides, certain things will have changed since his day.
timv wrote:incidentally, are there any fans of (a) Monica Edwards' Rye and SW Surrey farm/ seaside/ pony books or (b) Antonia Forest's Dorset family/ school books out there? Both authors were popular in the 1960s-70s, and ME has similarities to the 'Mistletoe Farm' books (remote post-War farm with no electricity and struggling with money) and AF to Enid's 'family crisis' books - and AF is a lot more 'adult' and cynical than Enid.
I love Antonia Forest's Marlow books as her characters seem so real and we see them at home as well as at boarding school. A couple of the books even revolve around an ancestor in Elizabethan times. Antonia Forest explores a number of her own interests in the series such as falconry, acting, cricket, Catholicism, Judaism, the Navy, etc. It's strange that the characters only age a couple of years yet each story takes place in the decade in which it was written (except the Elizabethan ones) so that the characters apparently live through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and into the early 80s without becoming much older! That brings us neatly back to Malcolm Saville, who does a similar thing in his Lone Pine series.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by timv »

One 'competition' that I have played with children's authors is to work out whose series had its characters 'ageing' least and/or covered the smallest period of years, but was written over the longest period. With Enid who only wrote two long series, we have the Five 'sort of' ageing from 12 (Julian)/ 11 (Dick and George)/10(Anne) to their mid-late teens, as seen in the Eileen Soper illustrations, by the time of the books written in the late 1950s. (However they look a little younger again in the final books written in 1961-3, 20 years on from Treasure Island). The 'Find Outers' age over their series is even sketchier, except that Larry and Fatty, the oldest, are around 14 at the start and Fatty seems to be old enough to be taken for an adult in later books. But in any case, the actual age of the children and a distinct 'time line' was never a major issue for Enid.

Malcolm Saville had his older 'Lone Piners' aged around 16 (David Morton, Tom Ingles, Jon Warrender) in the early LP books, written in the mid-1940s. 'Peter'/ Petronella Sterling, a tomboy with a boy's name like George, and Penny Warrender (who seems to have supplied the name for the female lead in the UK TV comedy series 'Just Good Friends' in the 1980s) are a year or so younger. The first one was written/ set in 1942, like Five On A Treasure Island. They are a few years older in the final books written in the 1970s - in the final. 20th, one, Home To Witchend in 1979, David is a trainee solicitor (ie he has a law degree?) and Jon is at university but Peter is celebrating her 18th birthday. There is thus more of a timeline over this 20-book series than in Enid's Five books- and the characters' later adventures fit the time they were written not the original 1940s setting, eg interacting with TV reporters and 1960s coffee bars.
The 'record' for a long series covering a short timeline must lie with Antonia Forest - the first book, Autumn Term, was set and published in 1948 and refers to the Blitz, and the final, tenth one, Run Away Home, was published in 1982 and references the late 1970s TV drama 'Secret Army'. The last but one , Attic Term, references the 1970s Catholic Vatican II Council and 'Dads Army' on TV. The characters are two and a half years older than at the start, in a carefully set out timeline; like in MS, each book reflects its own time of writing. At an earlier date, the record lies with Elsie J Oxenham's 'Abbey' series - books written from 1909 to 1959 covering around 26-27 years in her characters' lives. The same sort of timespan appears in the Elinor Brent Dyer Chalet School series written in 1925-69. I wonder if any modern author would have the devotion to their characters - or their publisher permit? - to carry on a series for that long today. Could J K Rowling do it with Harry Potter and Ron/ Hermione's children at Hogwarts?
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

There's also Richmal Crompton's "Just William", who appeared in stories from 1919 to 1970 but was always eleven. I think society moves on in his world just as it does for Antonia Forest's and Malcolm Saville's characters, as there are several stories set in the Second World War.

Rupert Bear comes to mind too, but that's slightly different as the tales involve fantasy and even the modern ones deliberately retain an old-fashioned feel.
timv wrote:Malcolm Saville had his older 'Lone Piners' aged around 16 (David Morton, Tom Ingles, Jon Warrender) in the early LP books, written in the mid-1940s. 'Peter'/ Petronella Sterling, a tomboy with a boy's name like George, and Penny Warrender (who seems to have supplied the name for the female lead in the UK TV comedy series 'Just Good Friends' in the 1980s) are a year or so younger... They are a few years older in the final books written in the 1970s - in the final. 20th, one, Home To Witchend in 1979, David is a trainee solicitor (ie he has a law degree?) and Jon is at university but Peter is celebrating her 18th birthday.
I don't know if there are any clues in the books as it's ages since I read the Lone Pine series, but David doesn't necessarily have a law degree. I think he could have gone into training straight from sixth form in those days, meaning that he could still have been only a year or so older than Peter.

About the name Penny Warrender, I seem to recall reading that the writer of Just Good Friends was a fan of the Lone Pine series and named the character as a tribute to Penny in the books. I can't remember where I read that though!
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

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timv wrote: There is thus more of a timeline over this 20-book series than in Enid's Five books- and the characters' later adventures fit the time they were written not the original 1940s setting, eg interacting with TV reporters and 1960s coffee bars.
Just to stick up for Enid a bit - I think its slightly unfair to suggest her novels get stuck in 1940's society - even the Famous Five's move on to a certain extent, with mentions of TV etc). Her books written in the 1950's are full of 1950's flavour (especially books like Rubadub Mystery, which mentions atom bombs etc) and later books, like 'The Hidey Hole' (even though I don't rate it much) and 'The Adventure of the Strange Ruby' are very much set in the 1960's. Enid even has her girl characters wearing jeans...so she did actually move on with society. 8)

The Famous Five series starts in 1942 and ends in 1963 as we know. I don't feel that the latter Five books are still set in the 1940's - so would have to disagree with that idea. They have a completely different feel, in my opinion. :-D
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Yes, I agree that Enid Blyton's books move with the times. Cars replace ponies and traps, for example, and jeans and television start to creep in instead of frocks and the wireless. We even hear of pop music and chewing-gum in The Rubadub Mystery, Snubby being a fan of both.

However, unlike some other children's authors (e.g. Noel Streatfeild and Antonia Forest), Enid Blyton rarely refers to brands, fashions, laws or current issues/trends in society. Not many of her books are set firmly in identifiable real-life locations either - she certainly differs from Malcolm Saville in that respect. I think that helps give her stories the "timeless" feel that readers often talk about - even though they're of their time in some ways.
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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Rob Houghton »

Yes - I agree - Enid's main strength (from a modern point of view) is that she doesn't tie many of her books down to a special moment in time. The few Malcolm Saville books I've read do seem to be set in a very rigid time and place.

I'm probably being a bit unfair on Malcolm Saville - in a way I resent the fact that I can never get deeply involved in his stories - I want to be sucked in, as I am with Enid's, and with other writers, such as Lynda Newberry, Helen Cresswell, E. Nesbit, Isobel Knight, Ivy Russell, etc - but Malcolm Saville's stories just lack something special for me. Mainly, I admit, it's because his chapters are too long and all I'm thinking about is 'when does this chapter end?' ;-)
Last edited by Rob Houghton on 10 Mar 2017, 15:04, edited 1 time in total.
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Malcolm Saville - Lone Pine Club, etc.

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Which books have you tried, Rob? The Lone Pine series seems to get discussed most but I prefer the Jillies series (Redshank's Warning, etc.) Strangers at Snowfell is particularly good. I'm also fond of The Master of Maryknoll (Buckinghams series).
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